"Van Lustbader, Eric - Linnear 01 - The Ninja" - читать интересную книгу автора (Van Lustbader Eric)

Doc Deerforth nodded bleakly. 'The same.'
'Do you want me to go?' Nicholas asked her.
'Yes,' Justine said. 'No. I don't know.' She stood behind the couch, her fingers
pulled distractedly at the tufted Haitian cotton. 'My God, but you confuse me.'
'I don't mean to,' he offered.
'Words don't mean anything."
He was quite startled to see that her face in profile seemed remarkably
different, as if he were seeing her now from the perspective of a different age,
some other life. In this respect, she reminded him of Yukio. Of course with
Yukio he had always imagined it to be the diverse mixture of her heritage,
shrouded in some mysterious world to which he did not belong and to which he had
brought but the insight of an alien. That, he knew now, had been a purely
Westernized response to what was, quite obviously, inexplicable and it somehow
confounded him that here, in the West, it should strike him so differently.
Perhaps it was but the passage of time - a certain distancing from the anguish -
which enabled him at last to see Yukio for what she really was, to him and to
those around him. It was, he thought, the space he had gained from all the
ramified, ritualized patterns of his life in Japan, which allowed him to realize
the mistakes he had committed, to understand the role of his participation in it
all.
Justine stirred on the other side of the couch, as far from him as if she were
in another country, and he smelled her fragrance.
'It's late,' she said. But it made no sense, was meant, he supposed, to fill a
void that was becoming too threatening for her.
Bur this kind of inner tension was one of the things that most intrigued him
about her. Oh yes, she was extraordinarily beautiful in his eyes; if he had
passed her on a busy Manhattan street, he would surely have turned his head,
even, perhaps, followed her into Bendel's or Botticelli before he lost her in a
swelling crowd; what else does he do with that kind of fantasy? When one
followed them up, one was invariably disappointed. Then she would have been on
his mind for an hour or so. But so what? Physical beauty, he had learned quite
early, was the arbiter of nothing, could even be a dangerous and bloody thing.
More than anything else, he needed a challenge, with women as much as with all
the interests in his life. For he felt quite deeply that nothing in life was
worth possessing without a struggle - even love; especially love. This too he
had learned in Japan, where women were like flowers one had to unfold like
origami, with infinite care and deliberateness finding that, when fully opened,
they were filled with exquisite tenderness and devious violence.
Just the creamy splash of the surf now, the record gathering dust on the
immobile turn-table. There came the cry of a gull, lonely and querulous as if it
had somehow lost its way.
He wondered what he had to do; whether he really wanted to do anything. After
all, there was fear inside him, too.
'Have you been with many women?' she asked abruptly. He saw that her arms, as
rigid as pillars, were trembling and that she had brought her head up with an
effort. She stared at him, daring him to deride her or, perhaps, revile her,
confirming her suspicions of him and, more generally, of men.
'That's an odd question to ask.'
She turned her head slightly and he saw the warm lamplight define the bridge of
her nose, slide down into the hollow beneath one eye, at the crest of her neck.